Mac OS X Gags/Pranks

I work in an office filled with pranksters. One of the guys has a 12" Powerbook (a recently converted PC guy) that is my target. I am not looking to ruin his system, just create a little havoc. The only thing so far that I found as an annoying trick is to place a few hundred icons in his dock so he has to remove them one at a time (he doesn't know of any other way).

Well, a friend of mine found a good deal on an iBook here in Boston, so he sent me a money order to buy it for him. Of course, before sending it back, I had to do something to it....

So, I changed the BootX image, the boot screen, the login screen, and gave him a nice custom desktop picture. Here is what his initial BootX screen and Boot/Login screens looked like, respectively...

I'd post the desktop picture, but it is really rather graphic. The best part is that he had me send it to his place of employment, so he got to see all of this with the company of his coworkers.

But wait, that's not all!

I also stripped his user account of admin access, owned the desktop picture to root, and owned his preferences to root... so he can't change the picture

Also, I didn't tell him the password for his account. Instead, I edited the strings for the login screen so that when he made three incorrect attempts to guess his password, a sheet rolled down and said: Riddle me this: Whilst I was engaged in sitting, I spied the dead carrying the living.

Well, he called me up and said, "Ok, I've had a thesaurus open for the past two hours. What the hell is the password. It's "a ship" right? I've tried every variation of the word!"

So I reply, "Oh, the password isn't the answer to the riddle. The password is: assgremlin"

You could change his email settings to say "You've Got Porn," "Porn Sent," etc, and then turn the volume up all the way.

A more difficult prank would be editing the hosts file in OSX to point all domains to 0.0.0.0 or an obnoxious website like www.pdjdance.com. I'm not exactly sure how to do this, and it's definately not quick or easy.

I have a friend that used to be a student at EVL. Well anyway one of the guys there was an amazing programmer. One day they see an XWindow on his system that's rotated 45 degrees. He wouldn't tell anyone how he did it. Turned out he took a screen shot of a window, rotated it, and made a desktop out of it. Fooled everyone for a while.

Maybe that gives you an idea. Screen shot of a window pasted as desktop is the window that runs with no app, never responds and can't be closed. Harmless and fun.

You could use the command line 'SetFile' (included in Dev Package) to make all the folders and stuff on his hard drive invisible. Just do something like 'SetFile -V /*' I think that should work.

Everything will work normally, but there will be no files on his computer. For best results, also remove all folders from the dock... otherwise they will open up, and if it's in column view, it will temporarily show the parent folder that should be invisible.

I don't know if this would work (or if it would just FuXx0r the computer), but could you trade around the binaries to all his apps located in *.app/Contents/MacOS/Binary? Then when he opens one app, the wrong one opens. Maybe this could be done more gracefully with symbolic links. I don't know... I'm over my head with this one.

Are there any convincing XP themes for OS X? That might be fun.

Ooh, here's an idea. I really like this one: Open up the Sharing preference pane, and turn on Apple Remote Events. Now you can run AppleScripts on his computer from afar. You could start gradually with a random beep, and slowly descend into absolute chaos on his machine, with apps launching, iTunes playing, play a movie you've loaded onto his machine earlier. The possibilities are endless.

The way you do this is:

Code:

set the target_app to application "Finder" of machine "eppc://the.ip.number.here"

using terms from application "Finder"

tell target_app

beep

end tell

end using terms from

Just slowly increase the amount of stuff you do on his computer until he feels like he has no control at all.

An even better way of doing this would be through ARD (then you could control his mouse), but I don't think you'd be willing to shell out 500 bucks for a prank... unless you already have the software. Heheh.

Gosh, this is a great idea. I'll have to do this to one of my friends. I had never thought of this before. This could even work across state lines with a static IP. WOW! I'll have to start harassing my dad. Thanks for the impetus for my thought!!

Edit: Wow. I'm still struck by all the implications. Two words: Dialog Box.

I don't know if this would work (or if it would just FuXx0r the computer), but could you trade around the binaries to all his apps located in *.app/Contents/MacOS/Binary? Then when he opens one app, the wrong one opens. Maybe this could be done more gracefully with symbolic links. I don't know... I'm over my head with this one.

It wouldn't work. And it would be much simpler to rename *.app and change the icon to something else.

Yes there is a very convincing XP theme for Mac OS X. Not convincing enough to fool a user, but enough to confuse them.

A simple one is to set his screen to invert colors (white on black) and then set it to millions of colors in the Display preferences to invert all the colors on the screen. But he'll probably figure that one out quicker.

It would be funnier to put a really confusing desktop picture, along with renaming his applications and completely chainging around his dock. Maybe you could also have the dock hidden by default, and have it be very tiny in size with the maximum amount of magnification.

In fact, just putting about a hundred items in the dock plus making the dock tiny and hidden with huge magnification should be pretty funny. Although all you geeks are coming up with some pretty elaborate pranks, more than I could ever think of.

Make the cursor invisible, that would be annoying. I liked how you could switch mouse buttons on Windows too. And ratchet up the double click speed. And make the desktop background PUKE green like Windows 95!